DISCLAIMER

This is the walk-through scripts in an offline seminar about *nix, which gives a basic understanding / real-world practices of the steps to deploy a typical web application to a blank server machine. The tasks includes creating system user account, setting up proper proper permissions, uploading crafted sourcecode, preparing server and database, setting up cronjob and scheduling crawling tasks, gateway, cache and load ballance ...

The sample application was a pretty naughty app for artists only, who likes nudity arts on 500px but just don't have enough patient to click "uncover" all the time. It was working well at the time of this seminar, but might not for future versions :-) (and probably the covered black tile has been removed?)

501px

So this is an art website of photographers, called the 501px. Note that it's not a 500px parody.

1. The very first step

1.1. User account

Setup your user account with the following details

• username: your email (drop the @offspringdigital.com)
• password: freely pick it
• home directory: /home/{user-name} Then use it to ssh.

1.2. Upload sourcecode

Upload sourcecode to /home/{user-name}/www. There are several ways to make it

1. scp
2. rsync
3. ftp (need to setup first, vsftpd is recommended)

1.3. Setup apache & mysql

Setup apache site (via virtual host)

• Port 80
• DocumentRoot home/{user-name}/www
• Run as user apache
• Run as group www (should create www group)

Import SQL database

• database name: 501px
• sql file at home/{user-name}/www/res/db/init.sql
• note that we haven't got any GUI tool
• actually, it's just a dummy task

1.4. Config the build

Symlink to make res available as /home/{user-name}/public/res. Using ln.

Change all the files/folders ownerships to {user-name}/www (user {user-name} and group www). Make the mod so that owner-user can fully read+write, the owner-group can read, and others can do nothing (no read, no write)>

Make all the files to-be-created res/photos/ has the same ownership ({user-name}/www). Hint: that's sticky bit, chmod +s. Also, the res/photos/ folder has to be writable by the www group, so that we'll implement the upload feature later.

Exec the spider, and wait

  cd /home/{user-name}/www
  sudo npm link
  501px-crawl

1.5. Setup cronjob for the spider

Let's make the 501px-crawl runs every 2 minutes. Please see http://code.tutsplus.com/tutorials/scheduling-tasks-with-cron-jobs--net-8800

2. Testing it

2.1. Tunnel to outside

As we don't have a nice domain name point to the playgrounds, let's make it ngroked. Just type

ngrok http 80 -subdomain=of-{user-name}

2.2. Benchmark via Google's Page Speed Insight

Or use the already installed psi cli tool

3. Improve

3.1 Nginx as a simple gateway

3.2 Caching and load balancing